Tuesday, November 6, 2007

If you want to get a glimpse of a Joseph Stalinyou likely had never conceived of
before, just turn to the mug shot taken of him by Tsarist police in 1912 --
opp. p 62 in Sebag Montefiore's fascinating, radically revisionist new
biography, "Young Stalin" (2007).

This Stalin is no repulsively pock-marked yellow-eyed dwarf
-- as Leon Trotsky, who enacted enduring literary revenge on the man who exiled
and executed him, described his foe. Nor does he remotely resemble the
dull-witted bureaucrat of Trotskyite lore, a man who sat out the 1905
Revolution, for example, pushing papers in an office. (He happened to be
tossing grenades at the time).

That Doris Lessing, at the age of 88, has at last won the
Nobel Prize for literature is a cause for celebration, and for allowing that
some things, at least, however unexpectedly, can finally go right in this
world. Why it took the Nobel Committee so long to come to a correct conclusion
about her achievement is the remaining mystery. It has, to her many readers,
been an open secret for decades she is simply one of the world's most
commanding writers, with a range of theme, material, style and genre no other
writer in English can match.

Sunday, September 30, 2007

THE 1985 CHAMPIONSHIP chess match between Garry Kasparov and
Anatoly Karpov captured the world's attention not just for the gripping chess,
but because Kasparov, at 22, embodied an outspoken, anti-authoritarian spirit
that seemed a rebuke to the Soviet status quo. Kasparov won the match, becoming
the youngest world chess champion in history and a heroic figure to many who
would welcome the collapse of Communism.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF the Hebrew Bible -- most notably the
King James version -- have been key not only for the believers who look to them
for instruction and inspiration, but to the evolving literary and cultural
sensibility of the West. It's no wonder, then, that the radical approach to
translating biblical texts that Robert Alter has taken -- first in "The
Five Books of Moses" (2004) and now in "The Book of Psalms" --
has been greeted with responses ranging from delight to irritation.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

SCIENCE FICTION WRITER William Gibson has a reputation for
forecasting the future that dates to his first novel, "Neuromancer"
(1984), in which characters used computers to "jack" into a virtual
world Gibson dubbed the matrix, a term that seemed ready-made for the Internet explosion
soon to envelop us all. "Neuromancer" won science fiction's top
prizes -- the Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Hugo awards -- and was followed by
"Count Zero" (1986) and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" (1988), to complete
Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy. These books continued to explore a futuristic
matrix while bringing disparate, even supernatural, elements into play.
"Count Zero," for example, invokes the voodoo deity Legba -- the
"master of roads and pathways, the loa [god] of communication" -- as
a lord of cyberspace.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

THE THEME OF fraught relations between men and women will
hardly come as a surprise to readers of Doris Lessing, author of dozens of
novels, short stories, and essays. For her devoted fan base, Lessing is
unquestionably the greatest living writer never to win a Nobel Prize. Now 88,
she belongs roughly to same generation as filmmakers Ingmar Bergman and
Michelangelo Antonioni, both recently deceased, and like them, she has explored
social, psychological, and sexual malaise.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

THE JULY ISSUE of Vanity Fair, dedicated to Africa and
guest-edited with much fanfare by U2's Bono, trumpets the
"lifesaving" impact of anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) on AIDS patients
in Rwanda, where the drugs are distributed for free by clinics. But when I
spoke to public health activist and writer Helen Epstein last week, she said
the magazine's version of events fails to acknowledge that the "HIV infection
rate in Rwanda began to decline dramatically in the mid-1990s, well before
ARVs, which only started arriving in the last four years."

Saturday, July 14, 2007

It's an understatement to say chess has been good for
literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to
produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for example, by composer
Sergey Prokofiev apropos a game he witnessed in pre-World War I Russia: "I
watched the . . . board descending into a state of incomprehensible complexity,
with virtually every piece exposed to attack; this sent me into a state of pure
ecstasy."

One doesn't really need to play chess to recognize the
ecstatic state Prokofiev describes; it arises, as well, from other deeply
obsessive pursuits. Similarly, one isn't really required to play chess in order
to relish the twin peaks of twentieth-century chess fiction, Vladmir Nabokov's
"The Defense", and Stefan Zweig's "Chess Story".

Sunday, July 8, 2007

The former Mideast envoy takes a hard look at Palestine,
Tony Blair’s new mission, and the failure of American statecraft

By Harvey Blume

LAST MONTH, WHEN Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip,
threatening the Palestinian Authority with chaos, and Tony Blair stepped into
his new role as special envoy to the Middle East representing the
"Quartet" of the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the
United Nations, few people were more in demand to interpret these events than
Dennis Ross.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

"[Bush and Cheney] didn't grow up in Brooklyn, where
you know if you punch a guy in the mouth, he's going to come back with three
other guys and punch you back."

NEW YORK CITY has been Pete Hamill's beat for decades, and
not a few of its residents are aware of that. When Hamill and I stepped out of
a diner south of Union Square in Manhattan last Sunday, a woman got off her bicycle,
pointed at him, and exclaimed: "You! How are you!? I love your
books!" After complimenting the bicyclist on her flashy helmet, Hamill
said he had a new book -- "North River" -- coming out. She already
knew, she said, and couldn't wait to get it.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

When I called New York Times science writer Natalie Angier
to discuss her new book, "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful
Basics of Science," I started by asking why, in the new work, is there
little of the impatience with religion she has expressed in some of her essays?
In "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist," for example, she complained
that for nonbelievers like herself America's "current climate of
religiosity can be stifling." In "My God Problem" she challenged
scientists who felt similarly to step up: "Why is it," she demanded,
"that most scientists avoid criticizing religion even as they decry the
supernatural mind-set?"

Sunday, April 15, 2007

"The church of art is very conservative,"
according to George Fifield, the founder and director of the Boston Cyberarts
Festival, the showcase for computer-related art that opens its fifth season on
Friday (see bostoncyberarts.org). As for the Boston scene, Fifield, when I
visited him at his Jamaica Plain home, summed it up thus: "Even now, you
don't find digital art in the MFA."

Despite the city's prevailing high-art tastes, Fifield
launched the festival here in 1999 because, he says, he had discovered another
side to Boston, a "radical hidden history of artists coming here to work
on new technology." Fifield is inspired, for example, by the close
collaboration between the photographer Ansel Adams and Edwin Land, founder of
Polaroid Corporation. Starting in 1948, Adams helped Land perfect the
technology for instant photography, and, through his own much-admired Polaroid
photographs, enabled Land, Fifield told me, "to make the case that the
camera was a tool for art, as opposed to just a toy."

Sunday, March 18, 2007

As the Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau, a tenured
professor at Harvard, explained to me how she slows light down -- and, when
it's going at a "comfortable bicycling speed," does something to it
that's weird even by the standards of quantum mechanics -- I couldn't resist
blurting out the suspicion I'd harbored since reading about her work:
"You're going to win a Nobel Prize if you're not careful." Hau, one
of nine MacArthur Fellows picked by the MacArthur Foundation in 2005 to
represent the history of its "genius" awards, just laughed and went
back to energetically explaining the apparatus she had built to experiment with
light.

WHEN I VISITED the writer Jonathan Lethem he boasted of his
new novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," being "a profoundly
unimportant book." He emphasized its irrelevance as we chatted in his Dean
Street apartment, in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, on the block where he
grew up and that he used as a setting for "The Fortress of Solitude"
(2003), his best known novel.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Elizabeth Diller, of the architecture firm Diller, Scofidio
+ Renfro, is known in Boston for her role in designing the new home of the
Institute of Contemporary Art on Boston Harbor. But in keeping with Diller's
refusal to sharply divide art from architecture, the building does more than
admirably house and showcase contemporary art; it also exemplifies it.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

"IN PHILOSOPHY," JOHN SEARLE told me, "the
name of the game is disagreement." Searle, who has taught philosophy at
the University of California, Berkeley, since 1959, shows no inclination to
duck dispute. In The New York Review of Books, for example, where he functions
as a sort of philosopher in residence, you can regularly find him at fierce
loggerheads with a variety of contemporary thinkers -- including Steven Pinker,
Daniel Dennett, Ray Kurzweil, and Noam Chomsky -- over questions of mind,
consciousness, and language.

Sunday, January 7, 2007

ROBERT STONE, THE novelist and short-story writer, was not
with Ken Kesey and the other Merry Pranksters when their bus steamed out of
California in 1964 on its psychedelic journey east. But as Stone explains in
his taut new memoir, "Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties," the
saying that you were "either on the bus or off the bus" was never
meant literally. The real question was whether -- metaphorically and cosmically
-- the bus was coming for you. In every sense the bus headed straight for
Stone, making its first Manhattan stop outside his apartment, which shortly filled
up, he recalls, with "people painted all colors."

More than four decades later, Stone, almost 70 now, resides
on Manhattan's Upper East Side, which is where we sipped tea and discussed his
work. Stone has revisited the '60s often in his fiction. "Dog Soldiers,"
for example, his bracing 1974 novel, focused on the mayhem caused by heroin
smuggled from Vietnam. But "Prime Green" adds autobiographical detail
-- about the sea, for example, which is often the setting for Stone's work.
Born in Brooklyn, Stone, the grandson of a tugboat captain, joined the Navy in
his teens. But he longed for New York City, and was pulled, when he returned in
the late '50s, into the coffeehouse scene growing up around Allen Ginsberg and
the other Beats.